Cinderella Story: Lily James is Making Movie Magic

Kenneth Branagh hand-picked Lily James to play his fairytale heroine,
and there is a magical aspect to the career of Britain's fastest-rising
starlet. Just don't expect the next transformation to be quite so sweet.

By
Sam Leith

Feb 8, 2016

Vincent Peters

When Kenneth Branagh signed on to direct Cinderella, the casting process had already been going on for some time. Hundreds of actresses had come in to read for the lead role. A few of the audition tapes were playing one afternoon, and Branagh hadn't been paying close attention until he heard a voice that captured everything he felt the character of Ella should convey: innocence and musicality and warmth. Not a shred of cynicism.

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The audition was by an actress who had come in to read for one of the evil stepsisters. It was 2012, and Lily James was enjoying a bit of fame after her first season of playing Lady Rose on Downton Abbey—a role that had required her to dye her brown hair blond. When she came in to audition, the casting director said she might as well try for Cinderella, too. "I honestly don't think I would have been asked, if my hair had been brown," James says.

Branagh had been looking for a young woman who could pull off goodness without irony, as well as "a natural ability to experience personal happiness that is not dependent on a man or things." He found her in Lily James, and the film—thanks in no small part to her refined gumption—went on to become something of a Hollywood anomaly: a live-action, PG-rated blockbuster.

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At one point during my morning with James, over a plate of lox and scrambled eggs at a middle-of-the-road café chain in North London's Highgate neighborhood, the 25-year-old actress tells me that she connects with sorrow and grief. "It can be quite draining, but I enjoy the darker emotional stuff," she says, rather earnestly. A split second later she's dissolving into giggles when she realizes she's been wearing her sweater backward. She tugs at the label and dryly observes that at least it's Saint Laurent. This reminds me of a remark Branagh made about James: that he was first charmed by her tendency to laugh so hard that she snorts. And that unaffected, rebounding energy is, for now, her strongest stock in trade. Grief and sorrow will have to wait.

James admits, albeit reluctantly, that of the characters she has played, Downton Abbey's Rose is probably the one closest to herself: fun-loving, warmhearted, a little mischievous. She's not precious about herself and seems oblivious to her looks. After being cast in the BBC's recent War and Peace, she burned through the Tolstoy classic, highlighting the passage that first describes Natasha: " 'This not beautiful but lively girl—animated eyes...' I wrote it down and sent it to my agent and said, 'I couldn't be more excited about playing her.' "

Not to belabor the Cinderella analogy, but the actress does share a certain quality with that character. Seated here in her backward sweater, she blends right into our ordinary world, but put her in front of a camera and she radiates, as if sprinkled with fairy dust. Burr Steers, the director of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, is reminded of "Jessica Lange when she was younger, doing The Postman Always Rings Twice or Frances. Lily has that kind of sex appeal and glamour." Zombies is based on the best-selling parody by Seth Grahame-Smith, which imagines a world in which Jane Austen's characters are fighting the zombie apocalypse. As one appreciative critic wrote of the book, "What begins as a gimmick ends with renewed appreciation of the indomitable appeal of Austen," and the same can be said for the film, which is equal parts action, horror, and comedy, with James making Shaolin-style butt-kicking in a Regency gown seem plausible. She brings "a lot of oomph," Steers says, "a powder keg of emotion."

Before breakfast we take a walk through a North London park. James in black biker boots, gray beanie, and leather trench coat, is look- ing very much the indie music fan she is. Her process for getting into a character always involves music, her first love. For War and Peace it was listening to "Whitney Houston and Radiohead." For Zombies it "was a bit more hardcore—drum-and-bass and FKA Twigs."

James has brought bread to feed the local ducks, and we stop so she can throw pieces into a small lake, at which point a flock of pigeons descends upon her, to the point where her arms are flailing around her head. What should have been a picturesque moment quickly turns into another opportunity for animated self-mockery. "To be honest," she says a moment later, having abandoned the bread, "I sort of don't want to do any more classic heroines for a while."

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With Cate Blanchett in Cinderella.

Courtesy Walt Disney Co.

To that end she signed up to play an American in Edgar Wright's Baby Driver, a crime caper with Jamie Foxx and Ansel Elgort. She'll also play a Dutch resistance fighter in The Kaiser's Last Kiss, co-starring Christopher Plummer, and she has been cast as Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, in Jerry Bruckheimer's Young Woman and the Sea. As they would say in Zoolander, James is so hot right now.

Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, remembers the words of the show's casting director when he was handed her audition clip: " 'If you want this girl, we've got to go now.' We knew that this was going to be one of the next big faces, and we couldn't hang about. Every once in a while you get someone who comes out of drama school and is immediately on her way, and that's her—whereas for most of us it's like climbing a glass mountain with the help of a toothpick."

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Indeed, not long after graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in London, James was getting raves for her Desdemona in an acclaimed version of Othello with Dominic West. ("We may have a new star actress on our hands," wrote the Daily Mail's critic.) There were the usual forgettable films—James adopts an expression of mock horror when I tell her I've seen Fast Girls and Wrath of the Titans—but her rise has been, by any standard, swift, with Cinderella giving her a curious fan base. Shortly after the film's release, while relaxing in a hotel pool in Los Angeles, she was cornered by some eight-year-old girls. "I didn't want to break the illusion," says the actress, who found that challenging in a bikini. "I sort of wanted to pretend that I was Ella. They asked, 'Where are your sisters? Is the magic real?' Of course it's real! Courage and kindness, courage and kindness."

If the actress is having a super-charged moment, "she doesn't appear to have a sense of that about herself," Fellowes says. "There's none of the bonkersness that can attend that sort of power launch. She just seems like—I hesitate to say it because it sounds boring—a nice woman."

James says she followed a high school friend ("the pinnacle of who I wanted to be") to drama school, but there had always been a good chance she would end up acting. Her father Jamie Thomson, who died of cancer in 2008, was an actor and a musician; her father's mother, the American actress Helen Horton, was, among many other credits, the voice of the ship's computer in Alien.

James (who took her father's first name as her surname professionally) grew up in Esher, Surrey, with her parents and two brothers, one younger, one older. She preferred Harry Potter ("I was obsessed!") to English literature, but she was a devotee of stories, particularly those invented by her father, an inveterate teller of tales. "We were in a paddleboat," she says fondly of a family holiday in Spain, "going round and round for ages as he told this funny story about Mermintrude the cow."

Her Potter fixation had her begging to be sent to boarding school when she was 13. She ended up at a place specializing in the performing arts, outside a tiny Hertfordshire village with the Potteresque name of Tring. She describes typically "naughty" behavior, including weekend trips to the village, to get drunk. "Matron started breathalyzing us," she says, "so we'd suck on pennies to neutralize our mouths."

Long hours on film sets are giving her time to read "all the things I missed growing up." Shakespeare became a passion once she started playing the parts. Currently she's preparing for a Lon- don run as Juliet opposite her Cinderella Prince Charming, Richard Madden. They will be reunited with Branagh, who is directing the production for his new Garrick Theatre Company. As the steamy first posters reveal, this is not your mother's Bard.

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It is not insignificant that Sir Ken, a noted connoisseur of talent, has taken James under his wing. The actress has called him a "massive role model." What she's learning from him is how to "marry the mind and the emotion in Shakespeare. He's so emotionally engaged in everything he does."

Offscreen she's navigating an increasingly tricky path, one often lined with trolls—like the paparazzi who dog her when she's with her Zombies co-star and boyfriend of a year, Matt Smith, a former Dr. Who, which equals superstardom in Britain. (Smith, coincidentally, was also the star of the London musical version of American Psycho; see page 168.) In 2014, Smith was the victim of hackers, who released nude photos of him with then-girlfriend Daisy Lowe. "It was terrifying and so unfair," James says. "It makes you conscious of not doing... You shouldn't have to censor yourself in that way. I've begun to think like this, and it's really sad."

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Around the same time as Smith's incident, Jennifer Lawrence was similarly hacked and called the breach of privacy "a sex crime." In the following year, Lawrence became an outspoken opponent of all manner of inequality against and harassment of women. James applauds her on both counts and can relate. "I realized really early on, especially because I'm young, that people will take advantage," she says. "I'm very open, and I stupidly thought that people would be open and fair with me, but they're not. I sort of found out the hard way." When I ask if she's a feminist, James blurts, "Of course! I don't even understand that question."

As a girl who grew up in sneakers and jeans, who "didn't have a clue who Prada was," James is enjoying playing dress-up for red carpet events, but she finds all the tabloid scrutiny perplexing. What to make, for example, of one paper taking the time to tally up the price tags of her red carpet outfits over a period of eight weeks? "We're just actors," she says with a shrug. When I ask James if she enjoys any part of being the center of attention, she says no. But after a moment she reconsiders. "My brothers would be like, 'Er, yes!' "

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